Social media and diatopic tension: A psychosocial study with Haddad and Bolsonaro's voters in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the communicational dynamics activated by the dissemination of fake news on social media in moments of collective mobilization, in the frame of the dialogic approach of social representations. In order to establish a comparative analysis, three focus groups were created with voters of candidates Fernando Haddad and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who discussed the content of purposely selected Facebook posts. The study extrapolated the conversational exercise to the dynamics of a social media, concluding that digital ecosystems, in moments of collective mobilization, behave as representational fields guided, from the psychosocial point of view, by relations of identity tension and, from a rhetorical or communicational point of view, by a phenomenon called diatopic tension, characterized by the coexistence of four interdependent variables: (1) topological divergence; (2) situational heteroglossy; (3) affective intensity and 4) apparent perception of factual control.